• Germany | An open government program
  The German government has published a program on open governement, in order to modernize government processes and increase transparency, "with structural reforms, new forms of collaboration and cooperation, as well as more horizontal and vertical collaboration throughout government departments as the way to do it" as reported by EPSI platform, that has more comments on the topic: 

• Spain | The blogosphere in white coats
  Patients and medical walk through hospitals and surgery office, but also on the Internet. The Spanish network of medical blogs is one of the world's liveliest: patients seek additional information to learn more about symptoms and doctors share experiences, new techniques and studies. The blogs explore a range of topics, from rare diseases to government actions.
  "Some networks will always faster than can go the classic systems of management and organization" said Rafel Cofino, one of the most active bloggers. For these and other reason the most important bloggers in this field and the Fundación Gaspar Casal decided to organize the First Congress of the Health Blogosphere in Madrid. The conference will take place next June 14th and will explore this part of the blogosphere with teachers, experts in scientific communication and doctors.

Earlier today I published a story on Andrew Stott as the new director of digital engagement in the British government. Later I recognized it was a story from 2009. I deeply apologize to PDF readers for my mistake.

• UK | Introducing Andrew Stott, first Digital Engagement czar
  The U.K. government has hired Andrew Stott as "director of digital engagement" to push its plan to move more public services online and to pursue a better use of digital technologies to engage with citizens.
  Stott will be responsible for implementing the Power of Information Taskforce recommendations:

• UK | Twitter: a new prediction system for elections?
  During the UK electoral campaign Tweetminster conducted a Twitter-based word of mouth experiment : they tracked the most mentioned constituencies and candidates and tried to map the correlation between buzz, word-of-mouth and the eventual election results through a predictive mode (here you can read more about initial findngs and methodology).
  The results?

• EU | Visualising EU decision-making: a new level of storytelling
  Euroblogger Julien Frisch shows us how online free tools can help understanding complex questions such as decision-making process.

• Spain | eHealth Week 2010 in Barcelona
   “eHealth for sustainable healthcare: global changes through local actions”: this is the motto of the High Level Ministerial Conference on eHealth, that is taking place in Barcelona in these days (until March 18th). The program is ambitious: in the conference the most innovative projects driven by the EU Spanish and European regions will be presented, creating a debate on the importance of ICT and participation in healthcare and the contribution of entrepreneurs working in the field.

This Friday we have a special "Scandinavian edition" of the Europe roundup, brought to you by PDF friend Bente Kalsnes.
If you want you can send us stories or interesting links to look into. And don't forget to check our twitter account!

• Norway | The Prime Minister is in the playground
  The Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg is inviting bloggers to his office this week to discuss about the government's new website, Samarbeid for Arbeid (which means, more or less, "working for collaboration"). The website is made of a blog and a Twitter aggregator, sorted by four topics. If bloggers or Twitter users want the Prime Minister to read their posts, they can register the blog or tag tweets with predefined keywords.

Almost three months ago, the City and County of San Francisco launched a site called DataSF where they publish data sets from a variety of city departments for public consumption and application development. The initiative, led by Jay Nath in the Department of Technology, was inspired by President Obama's transparency directive on his first day in office. They then looked at what had been done with Apps for Democracy in Washington, D.C.

The Senate's ad hoc Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight held a hearing this morning. The subject: "Improving Transparency and Accessibility of Federal Contracting Databases." Senator Robert Bennett spoke for many of us today when he sat up on the dais in room 342 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building and rubbed his temples over, and over, and over, and over again.

What prompted the subcommittee to convene today (if you can call attendence by two senators, Bennett [R-UT] and Chair Claire McCaskill [D-MO], a "convening") is a particularly difficult problem: what the American public, watchdog groups, and even Congress' own investigators know about the thousands of firms and individuals who make their money as federal contractors is trapped within electronic databases. Eight databases. Or a dozen database, depending on who's doing the counting. Databases with names like FPDS and ORCA and PPIRS, the last of which goes by the adorable nickname of "Peepers."

All told, there are a million lines of code involved. But there's really no all told here, because the databases don't talk to one another. For example, FPDS, the Federal Procurement Data System doesn't communicate with EPLS, which stands for Excluded Parties List. Which means that the FPDS-powered USASpending.gov website -- heralded as the American public's window into the inner-workings of government -- doesn't even know that contractors contained within it have been banished from government service for defrauding the United States government or otherwise behaving badly. What's more, on some of these legacy systems, a search for Contractor X, Inc. won't return results for Contractor X Inc. The shorthand for that particular wrinkle came to be, during the hearing, "the comma problem."

In fact, GAO's William Woods explained to the senators, the poor state of those databases meant that when his agency was asked by Congress to detail how many contractors were billing the United States government for work in Afghanistan and Iraq, the government watchdog group was forced by technology to admit its ignorance. "We could not answer those questions," said Woods. How many KBRs are at work in American war zones, being paid with taxpayer dollars? How many Blackwaters? Dunno.

Everyone was in agreement that that status quo is unacceptable. And so the question became, what do we do now? Enter problem number two...

I'm pretty confident that danah boyd's was the most talked about talk during the Personal Democracy Forum 2009 Conference in New York City. I can say this because she was mentioned more than 750 times in the twitter stream during the 2 days of the conference. Michael Wesch got a lot of buzz - almost 600 mentions - and Jeff Jarvis and Mark Pesce (who gave a really powerful talk last year too) did well, each getting almost 500 mentions. But boyd topped them all.